The Blackbird
by The Opaque Glass
Summary: 'Blood mixed with cinder and shadow. Her dull almond eyes stared motionlessly up into the cloudless patches of a cold, starless night; swallowed in Death's lightless kiss...' Gilbert Chesterton once said, "Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all." But for all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, "It might have been."


Prelude

Time In A Bottle

The smooth nut-brown liquescent in her eyes swelled, wistful sentiment flickering through the soft, treacle hazelnut of a swirling brandy haze. She desperately clamped together the convulsing muscles in her stiffening jaw; her long white fingers loosening miserably around the black aquiline grip of her dark walnut wand.

If she ever cursed God, it was then…

Thick sorrel-tinted tresses hung down her back in a low, distressed braid; loosely swept down along the elongated contour of her arched, sweat-speckled neckline. The cool, intoxicating perfume of sweet, rain-peppered grass was mildly laced into a dull, sleet-strewn draft; a soft spray of raw tickling rain spitting across her thin, unduly hollowed cheeks.

Perspiration, cold and slimy, surged down her back; beads of prickling, crystal-like sweat crushed across the thick, softly-angled hairs of her elegantly shaped brows; the watery pale glow of her skin mutedly lit in the dazzling sparkle of an incandescent moon.

"Everything is lost," she whispered. Her weary, well-worn face trembled; soft, silver light freckled across her pale, washed-out skin.

Inky raven hair, mussed and wavy, blew gingerly in the delicate, rain-scented breeze as he cast a short contemplative glance sideways. He blinked uncomprehendingly, and then turned back to scan the cold shimmery hues of midnight blue that shot through the murk of a high, dewy skyline; his tall, artless form dolefully bent as his starless onyx eyes flickered soullessly through the rayless clump of dark.

"Indeed." His dull, deadpanned voice was low, smooth; his soft pale skin chiselled like the features upon a sculpture of white angular marble; radiant and suffused in a warm, youthful glow of velvet light. "And now nothing more than a memory…"

Hot, unremitting tears spilled down the round, moon-spotted silhouette of her face; awkwardly clinging to the long ebon bristles of her heavy black eyelashes.

The dark, midwinter night was cold and barbarous; the lanky, sphinx-like trees strewn with tiny sapid dots of shimmery opaline white a spray of fine, iron-pearl stars dotted above the glassy, moonlit surface of a chatoyant black lake.

He frowned; his sharp white cheekbones marbled with streaks of creamy silver moonshine.

"Every rose has its thorns…" he deliberated; the stark, fog-dusted waters softly paddling in the cold silence of night. "All that we see or seem to be is but a dream within a dream; and in the end, all that is left of our lives is written on a headstone." He shook his head and laughed bitterly into the darkness. "Pathetic isn't it?"

Soft, doe-like eyes sagely gazed up at him through a dark raven drape of curled lashes; a mournful glow of sorrow eclipising the mellow-gold lip of her rich liquid irises. She frowned, and pensively eyed the crimping tussocks of white spectral air that warily spewed out across the cold, ominous face of the black, glass-like lake.

"Death is the only certainy in this life," she mused; eyes narrowed. "Without death, there is no life…"

Silence rang through dark, solemn night; fingers of fine watery mist enveloping the twinkling crescent sweep of a bright, glass moon. Around them, thin ivy-shaped leaves trimly topped the tall, snow-mottled maples surrounding the musky grove; their gristly, caramel-gold surfaces glowing with subtle, spider-net veins of welded carmine copper and wheat.

His dark, glassy eyes were vacant, and sad, ambivalent billows of spangled forest-green streamed through the almond-shaped ellipsoids of his irises; pearly, liquid-silver stipples of oozy tinge seeping in through the plangent puddles as sparse waxen-white strings of air spilled out through his nostrils.

Snarling thunder boiled above; crackling within a smoky gray bank of clumped cloud; the drab, cindery swirls of paper-granite sky dotted with tiny craters of twinkling pearl light. A feathery trickle of cold, sleety rain drizzled in over the shadows of the sleepy coppice; beams of dazzling mauve explosion tearing through the dewy miasma of a rippled skyline.

Small, limpid bubbles of glistening gemstone rain dribbled down the smoothened dips of her marbled collarbone; her cocoa-brown eyes flaring frightfully as she jerked back in alarm; tiny bauble beads of water bursting across her white, insensate cheeks.

A cool, moistened hand bent firmly around her small, delicate wrist; leeching her out of a flustered reverie.

_"Don't go,"_ he whispered; his voice quiet; suppliant; growing fainter and fainter as it whirled through gouging darkness.

Wet, satin-white silk clung to her cold, gelid skin; frilly sequent trimmings of baroque lace lipped around the low, crescent-shaped neckline of her long, flowing nightgown; a small, luster blue jewel aglow between her breasts; hung from a thick plaited chain of pure, clinquant metal, and flourished beneath a woven crown of golden, ruby-crystal flowers.

"It's almost dawn," she fretted; her eyes glowing with the depth of their cataclysmic love, casting off stardust as a diamond casts fire smouldering like embers of a flame in the heat of summer's night. "I shouldn't be here."

He looked up, shivering as the dark descended, and shrugged; seemingly uninterestedly.

Thick, serpentine shadows loomed directly above; shrill, bloodcurdling ripples of clangourous thunder cleaving through the black, chocking smog of a heavily besmirched skyline. Rain, needle-like and cumbrous slapped across her soft porcelain skin.

"Don't worry," she whispered, gazing up into the bright, circular glare of the overcast moon.

First, there was silence. And then, as a blackbird soared across the midnight sky; it's gleaming, jet-black wings delicately flapping in the cold, inclement breeze, she whispered softly:

"For death is only the beginning…"

The small, aerial blackbird burst forth into a glorious rupture of twinkling silver phosphorescent; metamorphosing into a tiny, bedazzling pellet of pure, resplendent light as its scopic, ebon-ink wings melted into the cold, whipping darkness; piercing the night with its shimmering luster and wondrously chilling splendour.

Then there was nothing, nothing at all.

**A/N. **_Is it alright? Should I keep going? _


End file.
